When evaluating these policies, it's worth keeping in mind that it may not be a choice between "Drug Sickness versus Normal Productive Citizen", but instead a balance of "Drug Sickness versus Prison Inmate".
Sure, a person imprisoned for drug-use may be "out of sight, out of mind", but--even ignoring ethical/moral issues--the raw financial cost of that incarceration is still there, and could be might higher than whatever was being spent before in trash-removal or patrols or whatever.
How about addiction or mental health treatment center patient, possibly involuntarily? Throwing someone in prison is not the only possible state intervention.
I maintain now (as I did when Measure 110 passed in Oregon, and in the discussions here in HN) that decriminalizing drugs would lead the state, and especially Portland of course, to a terrible and predictable outcome. Many supporters of the measure believed that it was the objectively right choice. Decriminalize, and get people to treatment instead of locking them up.
The sad thing is that you can make all the piecewise-correct A/B choices yet still end up having destroyed your city.
Yes, giving someone a ticket for using drugs and offering them treatment instead of locking them up might be temporarily more productive / more sensible. Yes, maybe it makes sense to put more resources to mental health.
Yet one day, you wake up and your city is unlivable and your block is terrorized by drug addicts.
Somehow, people forgot that once in a while there is a legitimate role for hard authority to punish people for doing things you don't want them to do. Lest your society go down some lawless path which step by step looked like the kind and charitable course to follow.
You prefer São Paulo's management of their open air drug markets? Massive police crackdowns and punishment that have become routine and exorbitantly expensive, over decades with no progress besides shuffling people around. What's the hardline authoritarian solution after that point, mass execution?
Sure, a person imprisoned for drug-use may be "out of sight, out of mind", but--even ignoring ethical/moral issues--the raw financial cost of that incarceration is still there, and could be might higher than whatever was being spent before in trash-removal or patrols or whatever.